Disco Bumpspark*

Isaac Newton as played by John Travolta. Who walks down the street eating out of a jar?

Fresh Ideas

Working minds are new minds. As we discuss dates and locations and possibilities for the first bumpspark, Robert Pinsky and Alan Lightman are also busy adding their latest thoughts to the world dialogue.

Gulf Music comes out on 10/16. Ghost arrives the following week on 10/23, just in time for Halloween.

Schmelling

My old roommate and good friend Mike Schmelling is featured in the latest issue (Issue 35) of Blind Spot, a magazine of fine arts photography.

It is ten years ago now that Mike was working on a series of photos in El Paso. He mailed a postcard of one shot to my family home in Connecticut. It was of a woman folding a shirt on a bed, a man in the background. My mom took one look at it in the pile of envelopes and said, “They just had an argument.” She was right, I found out later from Mike.

God knows how short a time Mike knew this couple before he was in a corner of their bedroom getting that kind of moment, but it was a short time. I always wanted to go with him when he worked, but I knew I couldn’t, that it would completely change the situation. It is there in some of his best work though; somehow he becomes invisible.

Congrats Mike.

The Camden 28

My good friend Andy Firda’s good friend Anthony Giacchino has been working on a documentary about the activists arrested in New Jersey during the Vietnam War for quite a while. It is finished. It is timely. It is getting great reviews.

I’m going to watch it tonight at 10PM on PBS. You should too.

Way to go Anthony.

Remember

What do I remember?

I remember the day before.

I was supposed to shoot a television commercial all week, so the same adrenaline that burned every detail of Tuesday into my brain was working in a different way on Monday. I was shooting a promo spot for a new channel called New Americans. It was going to provide foreign news broadcasts, English as a Second Language and job skills programming for the latest huddled masses.

I love shooting. I storyboarded thirty seconds of New York City diversity, Harlem to Hasidim, and set up locations in all five boroughs. I can see Carlos rolling his eyes with the camera slung over his shoulder. In the morning we took pictures of a tiny Indian girl in her tiny Queens home sitting in front of her family's gigantic widescreen television. At noon I had an Arab man meet us on Thirty-fourth Street and Park Ave wearing his native garments and carrying a rug so he could pray towards Mecca. It was one of the first images I thought up; something I had seen all over the city.

On September 10, 2001, at around one o’clock, I was superimposing the Muslim religion with the Empire State Building because I wanted to show their accord.

It poured at dusk. I was going to shoot in the back of a Chinatown kitchen first thing the next morning and I confirmed everything with the owner. I didn’t get two blocks when it just started to come down. I was caught in an old painted-over doorway on Mosco Street between Mulberry and Mott for forty-five minutes. The sloping alley filled with a raging flash flood, a river.

Just as quickly, it was over. All the way home, as I walked back to my office on the 29th floor of One Centre, as I glanced out our tower windows and packed up my things, as I went down into the subway and came back out in Brooklyn, and as I walked to my apartment on Hicks Street overlooking the BQE and lower Manhattan, I was looking up. There was the most spectacular sunset over the Towers. I saw many others before this one. This was a bonfire. The storm clouds broke apart into all the peaks and valleys of a fingerprint and caught every color in the spectrum.

I try to remember to be thankful every day.

Bumpspark.org

The new site is up.

Here's a press release for that.

And author Stephen Miller has joined our board of advisors.

Here is his book on conversation.
Here is something he wrote for the project.
And here is the press release.

More soon.

New Work

Here’s a nice way to start this thing off. Newsweek published an article of mine.